Iran, North Korea and the bomb

Spinning dark new tales

Something new to worry about

HONESTY is a rare commodity in the nuclear underworld, where Pakistan, North Korea, Iran, Syria and possibly others—as well as Argentina, Brazil, Libya and South Africa in times past—have long done deals for the equipment, technology and materials needed for their illicit nuclear programmes. Yet North Korea and Pakistan's notorious blackmarket-maker, Abdul Qadeer Khan, have both proudly and separately decided to tell the world more about their nuclear exploits. By contrast there is a worrying silence from Iran and Syria, two countries in the spotlight this week at the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN's nuclear guardian, for their suspect nuclear activities.

Iran's refusal to answer inspectors' questions about mounting evidence of nuclear-weapons-related work, or to pick up the offer of talks on its nuclear ambitions from America, China, Russia and three European states, bodes ill for the diplomatic effort to hold the non-proliferation line. Come the UN General Assembly later this month, foreign ministers of the six will be taking stock of Iran's readiness to co-operate before they decide whether to start the hard job of trying to agree more sanctions. They will have little to go on.

Pressed by Russia and China, which have dragged their feet over further sanctions, to show the minimum of willing, Iran handed over its counter-offer on September 9th. The one thing off the agenda, says Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is what everyone else wants at the top of it: a suspension of Iran's nuclear work, especially its uranium enrichment and any plutonium-related efforts, until Iran can re-establish confidence (of which there is anyway precious little by now) that its nuclear programme is, as it claims, peaceful. At this rate, in a few months the whole diplomatic effort will have run into the Persian sand.

Meanwhile, Iran's protestations of innocence have been undercut by Mr Khan's explanation last month to “Islamabad Tonight”, a television talk show in Pakistan, of how in the 1980s Iran secretly sought his help with nuclear technology. “We” wished Iran to acquire such technology, he said, implying official backing for the deals eventually done through his network. “Iran's nuclear capability [would] neutralise Israel's power,” he added.

Similar job-lots of centrifuge equipment for enriching uranium, potentially fissile material for a bomb, delivered by Mr Khan and his associates to Libya had come with the design of a nuclear warhead thrown in. Caught out in 2003, Libya handed over both the design and information that helped expose the Khan network. Had Mr Khan sweetened the deals with Iran and North Korea in the same sort of way? Nobody knows. Arrests of his associates in Switzerland turned up digitised versions of an even more sophisticated warhead than that passed to Libya.

North Korea is now boasting that it has completed experiments to enrich uranium, giving it potentially a second stream of fissile material (it has already tested two plutonium-based bombs). That is discouraging, but hardly a surprise. In 2002 North Korean officials privately admitted to the Americans what they were up to (before later denying it again publicly). But no one knew how far they had got.

Mr Khan would neither confirm nor deny—“maybe” was all he was prepared to say, and “at the moment”—that he had supplied North Korea with such equipment. He implied that whatever he had done anyway had state backing. But General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's former president, had already revealed that in the 1990s Mr Khan had supplied North Korea with some 20 of the necessary centrifuge machines, with instructions on running them.

Either way, even with Mr Khan out of the picture and some of his network rolled up, there is scope for mutual help between his customers. North Korea is known to have secretly built a nuclear reactor for Syria, of the sort it used to make the plutonium for its own bomb; that structure was destroyed in an Israeli air raid in 2007.

North Korea's claim (assuming it is true) that it can now enrich uranium opens up a another dark possibility. Centrifuge machines are hard to operate. North Korea will have needed help in getting them up and running. North Korea and Iran are already known to co-operate intensively in developing nuclear-capable missiles. So what is to stop them helping each other with their nuclear programmes? North Korea has plutonium and warhead-building skills. A master tunneller, it could also help any country wanting to hide its nuclear efforts from satellites. Iran, meanwhile, has the uranium-enrichment skills that North Korea previously lacked. Small wonder Iran thinks it can enrich on happily.